Opternative made white men a minority at its Chicago office. How?

What does it take to build a diverse venture-backed startup in Chicago? For Aaron Dallek, CEO and co-founder of four-year-old Opternative, the answer is commitment.

"Ethnicity and diversity is not the primary decision factor of how we go about hiring," Dallek said. "However, it's an important aspect of our culture, and it's an important aspect of a productive workforce and a productive culture and company."

Just nine of Opternative's 27 full-time employees are white men, including Dallek. Five are white women, including two developers. Another 10 are minority men and three are minority women.

Dallek said the company draws on its employees' variety of backgrounds and experiences to make decisions and solve problems. Plus, it helps them remember to think of the diversity of their users, he said.

With tech giants such as Pinterest, Google and Facebook releasing annual staff diversity reports revealing low numbers of women and minorities — particularly blacks and Hispanics — the issue has taken on new prominence in recent years. Some have blamed a lack of minority or female talent for their majority-white, majority-male staffs.

Dallek, a serial entrepreneur, doesn't agree that such a shortage necessarily exists — and made it a point with co-founder Steven Lee, who is Asian, to pursue a more diverse staff from the start.

Opternative provides an online vision test that costs $40 and is available in 38 states, including Illinois. The company, whose office is in the West Loop, has faced pushback from the American Optometric Association and other groups. In May, the company's test was banned in South Carolina, and pulled out of Indiana and Georgia following new legislation in those states. Still, Opternative recently entered a partnership with 1-800 Contacts to provide online eye exams to eligible customers.

The company raised $6 million from investors including Jump Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners and Pritzker Group Venture Capital earlier this year, bringing its total funding to $9.5 million, Dallek said.

Keri Wiginton / Blue Sky

Aaron Dallek, CEO, Opternative

Aaron Dallek, CEO, Opternative

(Keri Wiginton / Blue Sky)

The company finds job candidates through referrals and direct outreach, Dallek said. Company leaders tell employees that staff diversity is important, hoping to encourage them to find potential new workers that might not otherwise be part of the startup scene.

"I think you get a wider variety, a diverse group of people that are coming into your workforce when you start utilizing the people you have in your company to help you find good people," Dallek said.

One result: Some staff members said the diversity that is evident at Opternative made them feel more confident that they would fit in at the small company.

Hajra Sattar, a recent biomedical engineering graduate from the Illinois Institute of Technology, said she used to worry that she might not get a job based on her appearance. She is a third-generation American of Pakistani descent who wears hijab, the Islamic headscarf.

"If there was a company that had no diversity at all, and you could see it very clearly … I might say to myself, 'Maybe I might not get that job. I'll still do my best in the interview, but maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up,'" said Sattar, who now does research and development user testing at Opternative.

She said she met people from a variety of backgrounds during her interview process, which made her feel like she might be accepted as part of the team.

Kai Adams, a patient support representative who is black, said she sees more diversity in Opternative's leadership than she witnessed at another Chicago startup where she worked in the call center. She said that makes her feel like she has more opportunities to grow.

"When you see (diverse) young professionals … as CEOs and directors at a small startup, you realize that sometimes some of the stereotypes, they all fall away," Adams said.

Gerald Palmer, Opternative's director of patient support and physician network, said that he used to work at a company where he was the only black person. He described that environment as "awkward" and said he felt like he had to be careful with how he spoke for fear of fulfilling the "angry black guy" stereotype.

Meredith Morales, diversity director at the Chicago chapter of the Society for Human Resources Management, said she liked Opternative's approach and its early commitment to mixing up its staff.

Referrals can be a good way to find candidates who may not already be in the industry, Morales said. But she cautioned against relying too much on referrals, which could lead to many candidates from the same networks.

"At some point, you start to recruit for the same type of person, which is a different spin on diversity," she said. "You may have multicultural diversity, you may have gender diversity. But if your referral networks are just recruiting more people that think like them, (it could decrease) diversity within thought leadership, which can impact this company's success, because they're not able to think outside the box."

More than 30 people now work at Opternative, including part-time workers and interns. The hiring process has already evolved in the past few years.

"In terms of how the recruitment process has changed … it definitely has been something we've put way more structure around," said Venu Raghavan, who is Indian. He joined the company two years ago and leads its finance and analytics team. He said more people now meet with each candidate, not just those who will be directly working with that person. That helps screen for cultural fit.

As the company grows and speeds up hiring, maintaining the same levels of diversity could become more challenging, said Ayo Jimoh, Opternative's chief technology officer.

Jimoh said there isn't a dedicated program for hiring diverse candidates. Aside from referrals, there are other things that attract people from various minority groups, like having a black CTO and a conference room called Boystown in honor of the company's gay employees.

Opternative's leadership hasn't formally discussed how to manage diversity as the company scales, but Jimoh suggested they should.

"As we continue to shape our culture, we might want to explicitly put something in our cultural playbook that calls out diversity and why we think it's beneficial," he said. "Because it absolutely is."